The punk–reggae alliance and the emergence of PiL

Jamaica's long history of subjection under British colonial rule provoked shifts in migration that would eventually contribute to the complex connection between white British musicians and black Jamaican migrants in the 1970s, and the subsequent musical borrowings characteristic of some post-punk-era music. The beginning of the Jamaican migration to the UK dates back to at least World War II, when many West Indians were conscripted into the British army. According to the Times of London, on 22 June 1948, the SS Empire Windrush, in what could be understood as the beginning of the post-war wave of Jamaican immigration, ferried approximately 492 Jamaican migrant workers – including ‘singers, students, boxers, pianists, and a complete dance band’ as well as those willing to work in the coal mines – to Tilbury docks on the Thames estuary. West Indian migrants continued to travel to the UK throughout the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to address Britain's post-war labour shortage.

One of the central features of Jamaican musical life that immigrants brought to Britain during the mass migration was the sound system: an outdoor party serviced by gargantuan speakers and DJs playing modified American R&B and ska records, although these parties moved indoors when adapted for the UK. DJs Duke Vin, Count Suckle and Metro were among some of the first artists to introduce the sound system to Britain. Sets by Duke Vin at London's Soho Flamingo were advertised in Melody Maker during the UK's ‘blue beat’ craze of 1964, the year that also saw Jamaican singer Millie Small capture British audiences with ‘My Boy Lollipop’.Footnote ³ According to Metro, the UK sound system scene thrived to such an extent that, while in England, ‘nobody talked about Jamaica, because it was happening here now’ (cited in Maycock Reference Maycock1998, n.p.).

This process of relocating the sound system and its associated genres and practices from Jamaica to the UK could be interpreted as an example of what Susan Stanford Friedman has called ‘indigenisation’, the process of ‘making native or indigenous’ a cultural practice from elsewhere. This ‘transplantation’ from one country to the next, Friedman argues, relies on certain favourable conditions (Friedman Reference Friedman2006, p. 430). Jamaica's long process of achieving independence from the UK therefore inadvertently fostered the ‘transplantation’ of sound system culture from Jamaica to Britain. Thinking through Friedman's ‘indigenisation’, in other words, offers another way to frame the idea that the punk–reggae alliance was more contiguous than it was imaginary, thus echoing Born's ‘emergent’ model; this was in many ways a ‘socio-cultural’ alliance between two proximate music scenes, rather than pure ‘psychic tourism’.

The avenues through which Britain's white audiences came into contact with sound systems, dub-reggae and musicians of Jamaican descent were myriad, and have been well documented (Hebdige Reference Hebdige1979; Partridge Reference Partridge2010). The UK's mainstream audiences had a taste of some of dub's most celebrated names in February 1978 with the hit song ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ by Althea and Donna, which was produced by Joe Gibbs and Errol Thompson. However, there were many other nodes of contact and spaces across the UK that brought the punk/post-punk and dub scenes directly into contact with each other. Clubs such as the Roxy and Acme Attractions in London, and the ‘F’ Club in Leeds, played hybrid sets of punk and reggae. Don Letts (a punk–reggae DJ of Jamaican descent who claims to have introduced Bob Marley to punk, giving life to the song ‘Punky Reggae Party’) and Caribbean producer Dennis Bovell (who worked with post-punk groups such as The Slits and The Pop Group) both facilitated contact between the two generic fields. From the mid-1970s onwards dub and reggae records were lauded in the UK music papers, with writers such as Vivien Goldman contributing regular columns on reggae in Sounds. In August 1977, ZigZag went so far as to dispense with its ‘no black music policy’ so as to offer more reggae-related articles, indicating a fundamental shift in white rock connoisseurs’ attitude towards ‘black music’ (Needs Reference Needs1977, p. 29).

The movement and event series Rock Against Racism (RAR), which formed partially in response to Eric Clapton's infamous endorsement of Enoch Powell's anti-immigration campaign and David Bowie's purported celebration of Hitler, is one of the strongest examples of a musical alliance between (post-)punk and dub-reggae, and illustrates the kind of ideological ‘rapprochement’ between punk and reggae that writers such as Partridge (Reference Partridge2010) have described (see also Goodyer Reference Goodyer2009, pp. 10–11). The fact that the establishment of RAR was partly a response to Clapton's endorsement of Powell also helps to contextualise Levene's dismissal of blues-rock and its white imitators cited earlier; like other 1960s rockers, Clapton's career was built upon imitating Africa-American blues musicians, and he'd also had a hit covering Marley's ‘I Shot the Sherriff’ in 1974. By demurring from associating with blues-based genres but developing a connection with Jamaican music, Levene and Lydon, and those affiliated with RAR, could distance themselves from the inconsistent and problematic racial politics represented by the likes of Clapton and ‘all the rock and rollers’. As Simon Jones has noted, reggae's themes of ‘poverty, suffering and protest’ were apt to signify an opposition to the ‘dinosaurs’ of rock (Jones Reference Jones, Duncombe and Tremblay1988/2011, p. 218).

However, as Roger Sabin has demonstrated, punk's assumed status has an anti-racist movement has been exaggerated and perpetuated by a genealogy of mythologies, starting with the left-wing critics of the 1960s up to accounts of punk written in the 1990s. According to Sabin, not only was punk's interest in reggae a relatively superficial and romanticised one, but punk also neglected the oppression of British Asians, since their plight was deemed less ‘hip’ than that of the West Indian migrants (Sabin Reference Sabin1999, pp. 199–205). According to Born's typology, then, punk and post-punk musicians’ endorsement of dub may have been an attempt to bring about, or ‘potentialise’ through music (Born and Hesmondhalgh Reference Born and Hesmondhalgh2000, p. 35), socio-cultural identification not just between two racially distinct genres of music, but also between black and white in the UK. At the same time, as Sabin has demonstrated, this identification was marked by ambivalence and, as I shall demonstrate, the residue of colonialism.

In order to explain why the punk scene specifically might have been interested in relaying a message of racial harmony, British music journalists such as Goldman and Jon Savage wrote of a shared sense of marginality between punks and Rastafarians. Following an RAR concert in September 1977, for example, Goldman described the connection between punks and Rastafarians as the ‘new wave sympathy for their black peer group’. Goldman argued that it was their shared status as victims of an oppressive culture that brought punks and Rastafarians together. She also quoted Letts to support her argument that the punk–reggae connection was one characterised by an anti-racist message: for Letts, punk was the ‘first white movement that he could relate to as a black man’ without being made to feel as though he was participating in a ‘minstrel show’ (Goldman Reference Goldman1977, n.p.; see also Reynolds Reference Reynolds2009, p. 6).

The punk–reggae connection not only was evident in the UK's music venues, in the pages of the music papers and RAR-related events, but also several punk-affiliated musicians voiced their interest in dub-reggae and performed alongside some reggae acts. Lydon's personal enthusiasm for dub-reggae is perhaps the most well documented example. Lydon's prominence at the time as an iconoclast, enfant terrible and leader of alternative trends meant that his post-Pistols activity and his zeal for dub attracted intrigue and media attention. Three core events – Lydon's appearance on Capital Radio on a programme titled ‘The Punk and his Music’; his famous list of reggae recommendations to a fan; and his trip to Jamaica with Virgin Records boss Richard Branson, DJ Letts and journalist Goldman – have been used, most recently by Reynolds, to illustrate Lydon's enthusiasm for and esoteric knowledge of dub and reggae (Reynolds Reference Reynolds2006, p. 17).

Following the disbandment of the Sex Pistols in 1978, Lydon gave his first television interview since 1976 with journalist Janet Street Porter for London Weekend Television during which Porter asked Lydon whether his new band would be a reggae act (Porter Reference Porter1978, n.p.). That same year, on Christmas Day and Boxing Day at the Rainbow Theatre in London, Lydon's new project PiL had its debut performance. The review of the Rainbow concert for NME, written by Penny Reel, stressed how significant a figure Lydon was to the UK's punk culture at that time; Lydon was ‘the face of the decade’, someone who had almost single-handedly been the ‘catalyst for all that [had] happened in rock music since the Pistols arrived on the scene’ (emphasis original). Needless to say, the audience at the Rainbow Theatre was keen to hear Lydon's brand new, post-Pistols music. Echoing the hybrid billing of RAR events and other black–white activist concerts, PiL appeared alongside dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, Letts and punk–reggae fusion band Basement 5, and in Reel's account of the concert it was reggae, not punk, that ‘ruled the day’. PiL took to the stage accompanied by a reggae soundtrack and, to quote Reel's faux-Jamaican patois, this was PiL's ‘first ever public appearance inna inglan, inna dis yah time, yaah!’ (Reel Reference Reel1979, n.p.). Like Porter, Reel perhaps expected that PiL would be a reggae act.

PiL began their set with ‘Theme’, the opening song to their first album Public Image: First Issue. The song comprises a hypnotic looping bass line, sound effects, improvised-sounding vocals and a groove that evokes slow-tempo hard rock. Wobble's bass line in particular is conspicuous for its use of a – presumably forbidden – bluesy flat 7th and its adherence to an alternation between areas I and IV (though lacking the move to V that would complete a blues progression). However, by virtue of the song's prominent bass-and-drums texture, overall emphasis on timbre, Lydon's meandering vocal performance and the evasion of verse-chorus form, ‘Theme’ could indicate a dub influence and a significant departure from previous rock or punk styles. PiL's debut concert, Lydon's enthusiasm for dub and reggae, and events organised in connection with RAR, in addition to the roles played by intermediaries such as Goldman, Reel and Letts, thus illustrate the literal proximity that existed between the two generic camps of punk and reggae in the UK and the forging of the ‘emergent’ identification between punk and reggae.

Tendencies of appropriation: echo and the melodica

In his post-punk chronicle, Rip it up and Start Again, Reynolds argued that punk groups such as The Clash and The Ruts took the ‘protest aspects of roots reggae’, whereas post-punk groups such as PiL turned to reggae and dub as a ‘purely sonic revolution’, fascinated by its ‘spatialised production and sophisticated yet elemental rhythms’ (Reynolds Reference Reynolds2006, p. 18; Partridge Reference Partridge2010, pp. 25–7). As commentators such as Negus have noted, however, bands like The Clash did in fact borrow reggae's rhythms, particularly the ‘distinctive syncopated reggae off-beat guitar’, as exemplified in songs such as ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’ (Negus Reference Negus1996, p. 108) and of course their performances of reggae songs such as Junior Murvin's ‘Police and Thieves’.

Significantly, songs that used reggae-derived rhythms were not unique to either punk or post-punk. The Rolling Stones – Levene's loathed ‘rock and rollers’ – covered Eric Donaldson's ‘Cherry Oh Baby’ on their 1976 record Black and Blue and their song ‘Luxury’ from It's Only Rock and Roll (1974) is also ska-influenced. Led Zeppelin's 1973 ‘D'Yer Ma'ker’ is also a reggae song, within a deliberate pun in the title. Other punk and post-punk groups of the late 1970s also incorporated the rhythmic aspects of reggae. Several songs by The Police, such as ‘Can't Stand Losing You’, ‘Don't Stand So Close To Me’ and ‘Roxanne’, alternate between sections characterised by a reggae-derived rhythmic feel and those with more of a classic rock or pop feel. In the case of ‘Can't Stand Losing You’, for example, the song opens with a timbales-style snare roll. A rocksteady-style bass line and the offbeat ‘skank’ in the rhythm guitar establish the reggae groove. However, within four measures, when Sting's voice enters in his faux-patois with the words ‘Called you so many times today’, the rhythmic profile of the song becomes decidedly squarer, especially in the rhythm guitar, which switches from playing on the offbeat to playing four quarter notes per measure. The song's shift away from its reggae beginning is even more pronounced during the pre-chorus and chorus when the song unveils its ‘true’ identity with more of a rock feel, using punkish repeated eighth-notes in the bass and rhythm guitars and pop-style harmony vocals. The reggae groove returns again before the second verse and fragments thereof also recur during the instrumental break at the song's halfway point. Nevertheless, proportionally speaking, pop/rock is the song's dominant style, especially because the song's main hook is in that idiom. The use of reggae is, in this case, conspicuous but not pervasive.

However, other musicians of the post-punk era had more inconspicuous ways of borrowing from reggae and dub. Both Gang of Four and Joy Division borrowed from Jamaican music without incorporating the distinctive offbeat ‘skank’ that The Clash, The Police, The Rolling Stones and others had all experimented with. First of all, journalists from both the 1970s and the present have commented on the way in which Joy Division's particular approach to spatialised production in their recordings may have been informed by the kinds of techniques employed on dub records. Secondly, both Joy Division and Gang of Four incorporated the melodica, an instrument that had featured in reggae music since the 1960s in ska and ‘soul reggae’ and was in the 1970s connected with Jamaican music and melodica player Augustus Pablo.Footnote ⁴

In an interview given with Bert van de Kamp first published in the Dutch magazine Muziekkrant Oor in September 1981, Joy Division's producer, Martin Hannett, expressed his fondness for dub. Van de Kamp remarked, too, that Hannett's distinctive production style was identifiable because of the ‘[dub] techniques, delayed reverb, elastic drums and other special effects’ used on the records he had worked on (Kamp Reference Kamp1981). In the same interview, Hannett mentioned being impressed by Jamaican producer Joe Gibbs's music, even if it was not always possible to discern exactly how Gibbs had achieved a particular effect (Kamp Reference Kamp1981). In an earlier interview with Max Bell in NME in 1980, Hannett remarked that he was especially fond of the sound of echo and synthesised drums he had heard on reggae recordings, to which his friend, DJ Roger Eagle, had introduced him:

In a filmed interview with Tony Wilson (manager of the Manchester-based label Factory Records, the label for whom Hannett produced) at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, Hannett demonstrated his methods at the mixing desk in such a way that alluded to these dub and reggae influences. Redolent of dub historian Michael Veal's description of the ‘spatial’ dimension afforded by echo (Veal Reference Veal2007, p. 71), Wilson asks Hannett whether he uses ‘exotic electronics to create an imaginary room’ (emphasis mine, Hannett and Wilson Reference Hannett and Wilson1980, n.p.). Wilson's comments in the video perhaps indicate that dub-reggae was situated between two discursive positions: the quasi-indigenisation (that I discussed above) and exoticism. Yet what is it about the idea of an ‘imaginary room’ specifically or creating a sense of space in a record that, to Wilson, sounded ‘exotic’? Was this kind of effect more associated with dub, a genre with ‘exotic’ connotations, than some of Hannett's other influences, such as psychedelic music, mid-1960s CBS recordings (Bell Reference Bell1980, pp. 6–7) and records by pop/country artist Lee Hazelwood (Savage Reference Savage1992)?

Indeed, the use of echo and delay is one of dub-reggae's most central sonic characteristics. Although he doesn't trace the specifics of such a connection, John Corbett has suggested that music with an ‘echoey-mix’ suggests the ‘long-standing trope of Orientalism, usually linked to a “mysteries of the East” mentality’ (Corbett Reference Corbett, Born and Hesmondhalgh2000, p. 176). Partridge (Reference Partridge2010, p. 202) has also highlighted the importance of echo – as a concept and sonic phenomenon – in dub-reggae and Rastafarian culture more broadly. In this regard, I suggest that the sonic use of echo in dub-reggae may be connected to both the evocation of the utopian elsewhere and symbolic repatriation germane to Rastafarianism, as well as particular stereotypes about ‘Other’ musical cultures. Since echo is produced when sound bounces off a surface, hearing echo in dub implies a communion or mirroring with a distant location, the noise carried across the large space between two surfaces. To put it another way, sound is sent from Jamaica to a symbolic Africa and returns intact, thereby invoking a sense of kinship, connection and resonance, but also the assuring implication that the ‘soon-come’ elsewhere is, in fact, out there. The disembodied sound of one's own voice emanating from a not-easily-identifiable source also has a magical quality that suggests the supernatural and the uncanny, and therefore arguably plays into stereotypical images of the Other. Hence, perhaps, Wilson's reference to ‘exotic electronics’.

Hannett was not the only ‘member’ of Joy Division who expressed an interest in dub. According to his widow, singer Ian Curtis often went to the Moss Side district of Manchester in search of the latest reggae releases (Curtis Reference Curtis2007, p. 31) and drummer Stephen Morris has also commented that the band listened to ‘a lot of dub’. In response to Reynolds’ suggestion that the sound of ‘cavernous space’ on Joy Division's records produces the feeling that dub originated in ‘the Lake District or the steppes of Siberia’, Morris commented:

Thus numerous music critics, in interviews with the band members themselves, have suggested both implicitly and explicitly that Hannett and Joy Division's echoing mixes were inspired, at least in part, by listening to dub records. Moreover, a more concrete allusion to dub-reggae can be heard in Joy Division's use of the melodica, an instrument that was associated with Jamaican music, specifically Augustus Pablo. The band use the instrument in their song ‘Decades’ from their 1980 album Closer. It can be heard playing the repeated motif (see Example 1) at approximately 4:35, although it is almost indistinguishable from the sound of the ARP Omni synthesiser, an important point to which I shall return. Commentators both past and present have connected the melodica with Pablo (particularly regarding Gang of Four's use of the instrument) and it had also been used in earlier ska records such as those by Delroy Wilson and in songs such as ‘King Street’ by the Soulettes. However, even though the melodica was strongly associated with Jamaican popular music, its sound is arguably not as obvious a Jamaican signifier as a ‘skank’ rhythm employed by The Clash, The Police and The Rolling Stones. In the case of Joy Division, the melodica blends seamlessly into the kinds of synthesiser sounds with which they were experimenting. In their song, ‘In a Lonely Place’ (released by New Order), the melodica is clearer than it is in ‘Decades’ and it plays part of the song's main instrumental hook. Nevertheless, in this recording too, the melodica responds to and blends in with the synthesiser in such a way that its timbre is almost indiscernible (see Example 2).

Example 1.

The melodica motif in ‘Decades’ by Joy Division.

Example 2.

The melodic hook in Joy Division/New Order's ‘In a Lonely Place’ that demonstrates the blurring of the synthesiser and melodica timbres.

In light of the broader discussions of post-punk appropriation, then, I would argue that the semantic slipperiness of the melodica, as a synthesiser masquerade, makes for a more subtle kind of musical appropriation than those exemplified by The Clash, The Police, The Rolling Stones and Clapton. Given the culturally inscribed stereotypical association between blackness and rhythm (as highlighted by writers such as Ronald Radano Reference Radano2003, p. 234) in choosing to blend a dub timbre into their songs rather than dub rhythm, have Joy Division circumvented crude appropriation or crude primitivist stereotyping? Furthermore, given the extent to which rock and modernist cultural discourses prioritise ‘newness’, ‘transformation’, esotericism and secret codes, Joy Division's timbral experiment with the melodica could also be said to afford more cultural capital than The Police's rhythmic borrowings or the covers performed by the likes of Clapton and The Rolling Stones.

Joy Division were not the only post-punk band to use a melodica in some of their songs. Gang of Four also used the instrument on their 1979 record, Entertainment! Unlike in Joy Division's recordings where the melodic blends with the other instrumental timbres, Gang of Four's melodica captures the child-like, no-frills, amateur aesthetic of punk that music journalist Caroline Coon celebrated in her 1976 Melody Maker article, ‘Rebels against the system’ (Coon Reference Coon1976). Journalist Mary Harron, also writing for Melody Maker, suggested that Gang of Four's singer, Jon King, played the melodica in the ‘way he used to in primary school’ (Harron Reference Harron1979, p.18). The melodica's childlike simplicity in Gang of Four's music, then, was a symbol of punk naïveté and authenticity. It can also be interpreted as a rejection of the overblown synthesiser virtuosity that characterised 1970s supergroups such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer, much like the one-finger-style synthesiser playing of electro-pop musician Gary Numan, a connection made by Theo Cateforis (Reference Cateforis2011, p. 176).

In fact, the particular way in which Gang of Four incorporated the melodica into their songs can be heard as being part of punk's anti-virtuosic ethos. In ‘Ether’, the opening song on their album Entertainment! (1979), the band introduces the melodica during the instrumental break where it participates in an antiphonal dialogue with the electric guitar, playing in minimal single-note and single-chord bursts. Towards the end of the instrumental break, the two instruments (guitar and melodica) alternate playing dissonant chords on the downbeat, eventually collapsing together, no longer playing antiphonally, as their rhythmic diminutions propel the song forward towards its main riff. In effect, the melodica-guitar duet in this song is an anti-solo; both instruments play minimal, non-melodic parts. In other words, Gang of Four used this ‘primary school’ instrument in such a way that accorded with punk's overall ethos of anti-virtuosity.

However, following a concert on 25 March 1979 at the Lyceum Theatre in London journalist Charles Shaar Murray noted Gang of Four's debt to Pablo, describing the band's incorporation of the melodica as ‘an earnest approximation of’ Pablo's melodica playing (Murray Reference Murray1979, n.p.). Furthermore, in a more recent interview from 2009, Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill said he'd put his ‘hands up and admit’ having got the idea of using the melodica from Pablo (Reynolds Reference Reynolds2009, p. 110). What is significant, then, is the way in which Gang of Four, like Joy Division, absorbed this reggae signifier into their overall sound – as part of the no-frills instrumentation of punk in the case of Gang of Four or merged with other keyboard sounds in the case of Joy Division – rather than choosing to juxtapose more obviously reggae-style material with rock/pop ideas or recording covers as their contemporaries and predecessors had done.Footnote ⁵ This use of the melodica was thus more of an oblique or less glaring tendency of appropriation from dub-reggae.

Augustus Pablo, exoticism and subaltern performativity

Some of Pablo's own music suggests a self-conscious performance of exotic-ness, which may be interpreted as a form of resistance and as part of Rastafarian uplift. What is significant is the way in which Pablo's ironic or kitsch exoticist musical language figures into a perception of dub-reggae as straddling different locales and, as such, slipping between the ‘imaginary’ and ‘emergent’ modes of identification. As I have already indicated, one of the central characteristics of Jamaican popular music is its use of utopian ideas and imagery, as part of the Rastafarian commitment to repatriation. Images of an idealised Africa (as Zion, Ethiopia, the motherland, etc.), at a time either before or after forced exile and subjugation pervade dub-reggae music. Sociologist Sarah Daynes has discussed how dub-reggae musicians favoured a generalised image of the continent, a ‘single and homogenous’ Africa, rather than references to specific tribes or countries. Drawing on the etymology of the word ‘utopia’, meaning ‘no place’, Daynes has suggested that Africa, as it is represented and conceptualised in reggae's ‘collective memory’, is both ‘not-here’ and ‘not-yet’ (Daynes Reference Daynes2010, pp. 90–105). As I have suggested, the use of echo in dub may be heard as a utopian musical semiotic; or, at least, the fact that it has been interpreted by certain commentators (i.e. Wilson) as an ‘exotic’ sound encourages one to wonder why. Relatedly, postcolonial theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha have highlighted the role of performativity in subaltern cultures. Spivak (Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988) suggests that, in order to be able to ‘speak’, the subaltern must adopt hegemonic performances. Bhabha (Reference Bhabha1994) proffers the idea of ‘mimicry’, the moment when the subaltern or subjugated turns hegemonic culture on itself, as a form of resistance. The so-called ‘mystical’ or ‘exotic’ sound of echo in dub records, while not strictly an example of mimicry, may be heard as a self-conscious performance of Otherness in line with these theories and as an articulation of utopianism.

According to New York Times music critic Jon Pareles, Pablo coined what he referred to as the ‘Far East sound’, which Pareles has described as ‘minor-key tunes with sparse lines for melodica floating above deep bass lines and echoing keyboards’, exemplified by the songs ‘Java’ (1972) and the album East of the River Nile (1977) (Pareles Reference Pareles1999, n.p.). Veal has also suggested that Pablo modelled his ‘Far East sound’ on 1960s recordings made by the likes of Don Drummond, Dizzy Moore, Jackie Mittoo and Tommy McCook, all of whom made music designed to represent either Africa or Asia (Veal Reference Veal2007, p. 166). While certain dub and reggae musicians explicitly referred to Africa in their lyrics and album titles, Veal has noted how Pablo's own articulation of the ‘political and spiritual dimensions of his Rastafarian faith’ was through his creation of a ‘devotional genre of reggae exotica’. Pablo therefore communicated reggae's collective vision of Africa-as-utopian-elsewhere using ‘exotic’ musical gestures in addition to textual ones (Veal Reference Veal2007, p. 166).

Pablo's song ‘Java’ was a collaborative work between Pablo, producer Clive Chin and engineer Errol Thompson, and was recorded at Randy's Studio in Jamaica. The song comprises a characteristically reggae-style ‘skank’ rhythm guitar part, plus lead-guitar melodies, bass, the distinctive reggae rim-shot snare at the beginning, and a delay effect on the minimal vocals that repeat the word ‘Java’. The song's main melody is dominated by Pablo's melodica improvisations (Veal Reference Veal2007, p. 165). With regards to Veal's suggestion that Pablo developed a ‘devotional genre of reggae exotica’, and recalling earlier discussions of Otherness, one of the most striking aspects of the song is the fact that it opens with the archetypal musical referent for the exotic or the ‘East:’ the melody from ‘The Streets of Cairo’ or ‘The Poor Little Country Maid’ (see Example 3).

Example 3.

The opening melody to ‘Java’ by Augustus Pablo, derived from ‘The Streets of Cairo’ by James Thornton.

Originally a vaudeville song, ‘The Streets of Cairo’ was written in 1895 by American composer James Thornton to ridicule the authenticity of the ‘Egyptian’ dancing girls who performed at the World's Fair in Chicago two years earlier, who were most likely from France (Kennedy Reference Kennedy and Saffle1998, pp. 271–7). On ‘Java’ the unmistakable melody is picked out on the electric guitar, over which Pablo intones the largely indiscernible words ‘From the West … From the East … Hail … Java’. Pablo's lyrics, minimal though they are, recall the Rastafarian imagery of, and reverence for, a ‘soon-come’ elsewhere. What is striking, however, is that Pablo has replaced Africa with Java, perhaps demonstrating the non-specificity of Rastafarian utopianism. Even though the melody from ‘The Streets of Cairo’ appears only at the very beginning of the song, it forms part of Pablo's creation of the ‘Far East sound’, acting as a framing device for the entire song; Pablo's quotation of ‘The Streets of Cairo’ might even be interpreted as an instrumental toast.

Significantly, then, Pablo appears to have taken this image of Java/elsewhere from colonial power: a fin-de-siècle American voice satirising the sound of the Middle East. This image or symbol for the ‘East’ as represented by this eight-bar melody had thus acquired such circulation and semiotic power that Pablo, who stands as ‘Othered’ by white-dominated society, borrowed it for its capacity to represent utopian uplift. To put it simply, Pablo-as-dominated has re-appropriated dominant culture for his own ‘devotional exoticist’ project. In the words of Edward Said, ‘There are lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West’ (Said Reference Said1978, pp. 58–9; see also Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994, p. 73). Here a stereotypical image of the Orient – a fragment of colonial culture come loose and turned kitsch – has shaped Pablo's representation of a utopian elsewhere in ‘Java’. The colonial fantasy of Otherness has been transformed into a creative expression of subaltern identity.

And so, even though dub-reggae may be perceived as a genre or style that was quasi-indigenous to the UK, and musicians such as Letts felt a part of the punk scene, in parallel, Pablo's music evoked the ‘exotic’ as part of his commitment to Rastafarian uplift. It could therefore be argued that dub-reggae's identity straddled the local and the exotic in the 1970s rock media discourse. For this reason, perhaps, actors such as Wilson and writers such as Reynolds have continued to ascribe an ‘exoticist’ dimension to post-punk musicians’ incorporation of dub.

Between the imaginary and the emergent

In the same section of Reynolds’ book in which he discusses some other of the post-punk albums that display strong dub influences (Y by The Pop Group and Cut by The Slits, both 1979), he forges a link between the kind of ‘exotic connotations’ that dub-reggae offered post-punk musicians in search of inspiration and ‘newness’, and the artwork in which these groups clothed their albums. Reynolds points out the similarity between the cover for Cut (1979) and the image of the Mud People of Papua New Guinea on the cover of Y, suggesting that both groups (The Slits and The Pop Group) longed ‘for a lost wholeness that they imagined existed before civilisation's debilitating effects’ (Reynolds Reference Reynolds2006, p. 48). On the one hand, The Pop Group's ‘exoticist’ interest in dub – their simultaneous idealisation, representation and containment of non-Western cultures deployed to criticise life in the UK, which extended beyond using dub-reggae sounds into a more generalised image of ‘Other’ cultures – participated in the familiar asymmetrical dialogue that has taken place between much Western music and its Others. On the other hand, what is so striking about The Pop Group's utopian vision of ‘pre-civilised society’ is that it to some extent recalls the utopianism at the centre of the Rastafarian movement. Yet the two strains of utopianism arise from different circumstances: from slavery, forced migration and colonialism in the case of the Rastafarians, and as part of a broadly creative process for the post-punk musicians.

Rastafarian utopianism seems to have been one of the central aspects of reggae culture that found resonance with Britain's white youth, exemplified by the union between the two socio-musical scenes on the stages at certain activist events such as RAR. As a quasi-indigenised UK genre, dub-reggae's proximity to the punk scene, both in terms of its politics and in terms of literal physical space, afforded a different kind of identification than the one that characterised 1960s blues-rock, where white performers mediated African-American music and experiences; ‘the blues’ may not have had ‘anything to do with’ Levene, but many post-punk musicians felt a kinship with reggae and dub.Footnote ⁶ However, as Reynolds's reference to The Pop Group's exoticist utopianism implies, in spite of the shared disenchantment with the socio-political status quo in Britain at the time and the literal proximity between post-punk and dub-reggae musicians, the discourse of Britain's post-punk subculture captured this ambivalence, framing dub and its musicians as both local and ‘exotic’, proximate and remote.

Journalist Vivien Goldman's reports on the aforementioned trip that Lydon made to Jamaica in 1978 with Branson, Letts and Goldman herself published in Sounds magazine in March 1978 also demonstrate this slippage between the ‘emergent identification’ and the ‘imaginary’. Her articles exemplify the new socio-cultural alliance on the one hand, but echo Britain's colonial past on the other. According to Goldman, Lydon was flown to Jamaica to work as an A&R scout for Virgin, having proven his ‘impeccable’ qualifications with his playlist for the Capital Radio programme (Goldman Reference Goldman1978a, n.p.). Lydon confessed at the time that his motivation for joining Branson et al. in Jamaica, and agreeing to act as a talent scout was as much to save himself money on Jamaican records as it was to raise the profile of Jamaican music in the UK (Courtney Reference Courtney1978, n.p.). Opening her report on the Jamaican trip Goldman set both the soundtrack and scene. She listened to Jamaican singer Mikey Dread when she arrived and her article begins with references to famous Kingston landmarks such as the Sheraton Hotel (featured in Perry Henzell's 1972 film The Harder They Come) and Randy's Record store and studio, where renowned musicians such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Bob Marley made records. While staying at the Sheraton, Goldman remarked that the roster of live musicians playing at the hotel made it feel as though ‘you were wading through your singles collection every time you went to get a glass of water’, name-dropping Peter Tosh, Tapper Zukie, Culture, Robbie Shakespeare, Sly Dunbar and Perry as the hotel's principal entertainers (Goldman Reference Goldman1978a, n.p.).

When describing the socio-economic conditions in Jamaica, Goldman employed a similar narrative strategy to the one used by Hebdige in his 1979 book on post-war British youth culture, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, extrapolating perceived parallels between the poverty she witnessed in Jamaica and the kind faced by Britain's working class youth (specifically Lydon as the son of Irish immigrants). She also suggested that music offered a way for the oppressed in both cultures to escape poverty and that Rastafarian utopianism was integral to both cultures (Goldman Reference Goldman1978a, n.p.). Unemployment, existential emptiness, music, narcotics and millenarianism were the things that, for Goldman, fostered a kindred connection between Jamaicans and England's suffering lower classes. Lydon and Goldman's trip to Jamaica, and Goldman's report, then, can be understood as an attempted actualisation of the cross-cultural identification already ‘emergent’ among certain members of Britain's punk scene and other white reggae fans. In making the pilgrimage, as it were, from London to Kingston, Lydon, Goldman et al. were modulating the punk's scene's identification with dub-reggae through the ‘emergent’ into something more ‘real’, retracing the transatlantic route at the heart of reggae culture.

Nevertheless, there are some significant aspects of Goldman's report of Lydon's trip to Jamaica that challenge the idea of an ‘emergent’ and/or ‘real’ identification by re-inscribing Jamaican ‘Otherness’ and rebounding the punk–reggae identification from the ‘emergent’, back into the ‘purely imaginary’ realm. While raging against his former manager Malcolm McLaren and McLaren's associate Vivien Westwood, Lydon revealed Westwood and McLaren's casual racism and tourist idealisation of Jamaica. Regarding Lydon's trip to Jamaica, the pair was reported to have said that Lydon had ‘gone away to the sun in Jamaica to grow his cock’ (Goldman Reference Goldman1978b, n.p.). Westwood's alleged reference to the size of Lydon's proverbial ‘gear’ and its hoped-for improvement upon travelling to Jamaica reveals how white-dominated culture's fixation with black male genitalia has been one way of sustaining the colonial project, by objectifying, homogenising and fixing black bodies as simultaneously abject and alluring (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994, p. 67). Thus the fact that Westwood chose to depict Lydon's interest in dub-reggae and his trip to Jamaica using such a stereotype contributed to reinforcing the idea that black musicians, even those in Britain, still represented an objectified Otherness.

Westwood's language and ideas (paraphrased by Lydon in the interview with Goldman) thus bore the sinister traces of power asymmetries, and for all their striving to surpass the realm of ‘purely imaginary’ musical identification, similar kinds of colonial structures surfaced in other articles by Goldman herself. Just one week after the second instalment of her piece recounting Lydon's Jamaican experience, Goldman published another article in Sounds on the reggae band Culture, which was suffused with exotic imagery. Goldman focused on facets of Jamaican life that are especially ‘natural’, ‘animal’, ‘erotic’ and ‘spiritual’. She chose to open the article with an image of Culture's singer Joseph Hill washing his hair with cactus. She then observed the different kinds of exotic fruit growing in abundance – the wild cherry and the ugli – as well as the goats, the children playing makeshift instruments and the marijuana. ‘The entire country encounter’, she wrote, ‘seemed like a dream’. In her descriptions of Hill, Goldman also invoked a stereotype common to descriptions of black men of the spiritual leader or the shaman type:

What is more, Goldman detailed how Hill lived with his mother in a two-room house, with a ‘lushly flourishing garden’, like a ‘Tropical Greenhouse at Kew with the lid off’ in a ‘land that's so blatantly fertile’. Goldman also justified Rastafarianism's negative attitudes towards women by suggesting that such beliefs ‘tie in with fears of a culture that's rooted in the seasons. The cycles of the moon exert a fully acknowledged power in the absence of streetlights’ (Goldman Reference Goldman1978c, n.p.).

Under Goldman's pen, then, Jamaica was an exotic, erotic, primitive paradise, and her reporting on Jamaica falls into the long-standing historical trend of simultaneously idealising yet containing the Other through particular kinds of representation. Here the Other is revered for its mysticism, virility and earthiness – images that bands such as The Pop Group and The Slits also attributed to reggae culture.Footnote ⁷ Even though the kind of identification that Goldman and Lydon were cultivating (with press articles, interviews, trips and musical borrowings) was one that highlighted similarity along the axis of socio-economic disenfranchisement, a sense of difference was nonetheless articulated through Goldman's exoticisation. Furthermore, the kind of poverty experienced by West Indian migrants living back in the UK was arguably more severe, or less of a performance, than the kind encountered by dub-reggae's white punk counterparts. In an interview with UK reggae group Aswad, for example, Goldman quoted their bass player George Oban who pointed out the difference between the posturing of punk and the real hardship of Jamaican immigrants:

Goldman's response was to point out that not all punks are necessarily dilettantes, but conceded, ‘those mohair jumpers with prefab holes do cost £26.00’ (Goldman Reference Goldman1977, n.p.). Despite the fact that many parts of Britain had existing West Indian communities, and that the dub-reggae music scene was somewhat ‘indigenous’ to the UK (in Friedman's sense of the term), Goldman's publications in Sounds, especially her trip to Kingston with Lydon, would have provided British readers with exposure to Jamaican cultural life that to some extent fitted the pre-established models for understanding difference, with echoes of the colonial-era travelogue.